You Are Among Friends

So, you guys, it turns out that I really like two things lately:

1. Marshmallows

and 2. Louis C.K. (you're watching Louie, right?) (P.S. Hey both of these videos are probably NSFW and contain "strong" language!)

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Larry's birthday was on Tuesday, and to celebrate we went to dinner at Boltini and stuck around for our first-ever trivia night.

Spoiler alert: We got second place. Don't bother double-checking, you read that right: second place at our first-ever trivia night. Our team consisted of my parents, Larry, me, Josh, Niccole, and Brandon T. Washington, all of us sitting impractically in a line of tall stools pushed up to the bar where our dinner plates had just been cleared. Between rounds, people stopped to say hi, wish a happy birthday to Larry,  tip a drink or hug a hug, and then agonize over the year the Berlin Wall was built, or about the name of a 2004 Stephen King miniseries.

I'd planned for Larry's three best friends to let themselves in at our place and be well settled into our couch with several boozes and a record on by the time we got home from dinner, when dinner was the only plan, but halfway through the day, Larry suggested we go out for trivia night, and so I e-mailed the boys, frantically capital: DUDES. CHANGE OF PLANS and within one hour all three of them, all with families at home and a stack of plates always spinning, confirmed: Roger that. Boltini. Trivia.

Larry, this familiar face. People talk to him everywhere we go.

date night tonight: chicken parmesan (veggie for me!! hello! vegetarian here! veggie crossing!) and cold white wine at home, then to the movies. starting tomorrow, i embark on an adventure to montana with some stellar female members of my family and i am so excited. i have absolutely no realistic idea of what we will be doing, and i prefer it that way. what's good in billings? mountains? streams? billygoats? i'm in. i want it all.

“Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true, and there are a million little strings attached to every choice you make. You can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for 20 years and you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is - it’s what you create.

And even though the world goes on for eons and eons you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born, but while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right, and it never comes, or it seems to but it doesn’t really, so you spend your time in vague regret or even vaguer hope that something good will come along something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved, and the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I’ve felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long.  And for just as long I’ve been pretending that I’m okay, just to get along just for…I don’t know why.  Maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery because they have their own.  Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

- Synecdoche, New York (2008)

I saw this movie a few weeks ago at the historic Virginia Theater with Roger Ebert and Charlie Kaufman both in attendance. Afterward, during the Q&A, someone asked Charlie which of his leading characters he most identified with, and he said that he identified with all of them; if he didn't identify with a character he was writing, he was merely "commenting" on them. I reached for my bag and wrote that down.

Based on baffled Facebook updates from friends who had seen it, I was afraid that I would be totally lost in the movie, trying to keep up and find my legs, but that wasn't the case at all. I read Roger's festival review beforehand, and that helped. That night, he told the audience he considers Synecdoche (carefully programmed into his voice synthesizer syllable-by-syllable) to be the best film of the entire decade.

I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That's what I want to explore. We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't.